Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

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Why should I use tmux over screen?

Why do I use screen over tmux?:

- its old. A stable version is on every distro. Trying to start a screen session is more likely to succeed on any given box than a tmux session. I see my friends wrestle with their tmux setup being more recent on one box than another and their nested sessions get screwed up. I never have any issue.

- I know it, and for my simple use it does everything perfectly. I can split panes, I can detach and come back, I can nest sessions.

- screen can attach to serial terminals.

What's the killer feature of tmux that I'm missing out on?

Not sure if it works in GNU Screen but tmux can be controlled from the command line. Examples:

    tmux show-buffer | vipe | bash -
    tmux send-keys -t debugger run

This allows nice ad hoc scripts that are composable in a very Unix-y way.

It's maintainable, modern code, which screen is not. Screen is not dead yet, but it eventually will be.

He didn't ask which one is nicer to hack on.

No, they asked "Why should I use tmux over screen?", which the answer was relevant to.

Doesn't seem that way to me at all.

I use both, and enjoy that they have different control keys by default, so I can nest them painlessly without need for any configuration.

Also, tmux works out-of-the-box for accounts that you su'ed into, something I never managed with screen.

Try out Byobu. It's built on tmux, and it's nicer to use than screen, I find. Stupid name, but has some conveniences. Mostly I just use F2 to create a parallel terminal and F3/4 to cycle through them.

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